I sent the plush elephant drawing Oh Bother to Sharon Pincott, a naturalist, photographer, and writer that does a lot of work with elephants in Africa. The video I posted above is hers. She wrote me back a wonderful note:

Hi Arius,

Your elephant image is really touching. Captioned with something like “Please don’t kill or maim me by setting wire snares” it could be a really powerful wildlife conservation message.

With best wishes,

Sharon and the Hwange Estate elephants

Thanks for the response, Sharon, and best of luck with your writing for Getaway magazine and your work with these majestic organisms!

Dr. Phillip Willink of the Field Museum, wadin' around

I also emailed my invasive species drawing Genghis Kharp to Dr. Phillip Willink of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He responded thusly:

Hello Arius,

That is a great picture of an Asian carp! Excellent. I hope it was well received at the art exhibition. Surely people enjoyed it.

And thank you for your interest in this topic. It is very complicated, with scientific, biological, political, social, etc. aspects to it. Then again, Asian carp are just the tip of the iceberg. Some of us have been involved with Great Lakes’ invasive species for years, and will continue to battle them for years to come.

Thank you for your email,

Phil

This is part of the thrill of making art about science. There are so many gifted people working hard on the problems and issues and research, being able to send them something to acknowledge and celebrate their hard work is a real treat. They are champions, and I’m a damned cartoonist. It’s very affirming to be able to connect with them.

Hi friends! After a wonderful week of carting my cousin around to prospective art colleges, and after successfully selling my spider salad piece at the 8×8 show at the Peoria Art Guild, my psychological artist’s block has been crushed into tiny bits, and I’m ready to get back to work.

The first order of business is of course to finish getting my animation pieces online. So the second lecture, Sex Chose Art, is now available in the animation page. Take a look!

In many ways, this lecture was my most successful, but for the same reasons it had the roughest transition to the written word. The animations are simple and clear, but there is far more content needed to be presented per image. As a result, especially toward the end, there are big blocks of text. The important part is that it’s online for posterity!

After a few weeks of Dreamweaver tutorials, CSS wrangling, my basic site is online. Check out the gallery, the comics, and one of my storybook-style animations! I’ll slowly be getting the other four animations I have online, as I have to add text that I originally delivered as a lecture.

I also have aims to get a Design section to house all the tech work and toy design stuff I’ve done in the past, but I’m waiting on some legal permissions before I can do that. Once everything’s all tidied up, I’ll finally go and get a links page up to direct to other artists and cartoonists.

Thanks for your interest! This blog will serve as a notice board for updates, or to share little sketches, or to talk about relevant art stuff of interest. Nothing too lofty.